What would be the point? You clearly don't understand what he's told you and have pre-conceived notions of reality that won't change, so what good would other people telling you the truth do?
And so what then determined the make up of an organism? Previous evolutionary steps of course. Just because something currently is well adapted to an environment but is unable to become a dominant species does not mean it does not have the capacity to become the dominant species off the back of a chance happening. Alot of natural selection will come down to pure chance
Pretty sure quite in a similar way that crocodiles do. Them being quite close evolutionary matches of course(well some species, some dino species were closer to birds)
Russian Fury When you are about to have a crazy orgasm, and you try to hold it as much as you can and you just start beating your sex partner.
the argument is about 'beneficial mutations' not mutation generally and i am of the view which is simply that chance cannot be 'natural selection' can it?
fish and chips with russian dressing The classic fish and chips with russian dressing requires at least three people, one of which must be a woman on her period, and one of which must be a man. The man penetrates the bleeding woman (this would be the fish and chips) and upon orgasm completes the preparation of the russian dressing, i.e. semen mixed with menstrual blood. The third person simply laps everything up from below. While the gender of the third person is irrelevant, their presence is necessary because it's only an FnC with RD if someone is eating it.
I can't say that I agree with Jacky's views about random chance, but I'll point out how it fits what you're saying. You have two identical creatures living in the same environment. One develops a beneficial mutation and the other doesn't, either developing a non-beneficial one or none at all. Which has a better chance of survival and thus passing on it's DNA and the potential for that mutation to continue?
Beneficial mutuations happen once every ridiculous statistical number. But you are underestimating the timescale involved and that number of mutations happening at a dgiven moment. Most mutations have no effect, then the next most frequent are disadvantageous mutations, these can exhibit themselves immediately and result in organism death (i.e. cancer) or they may not exhibit themselves and are passed on only to show themselves later down the genetic lline as a disability. However in an instance a beneficial mutation will occur that will be passed along the genetic line giving a slight competitive advantage (micro-evolution, e.g. resistance to a certain strain of disease), over a large timescale many beneficial mutations start to amalgamate and create a large competitive advantage (macro-evolution e.g. sight). Chance is natural selection as the laws of probability are a natural phenomenon. But chance only plays one part of an organism's survival prospects. Some chance happenings will result in death but are beyond the organism's contriol (e.g. volcanic eruption) while others are within the organism's control to an extent (e.g avoiding predation)
Jesus H Christ, I go for my lunch break and when I come back this thread is up to 4 pages. What did I miss? I couldn't be arsed reading it all.